Isa Nakazawa - San Francisco

Isa Nakazawa is a poet, spoken word artist, artist, and all around indescribable interdisciplinary creator currently living in San Francisco, CA. She runs, writes, & holds it down at the hip hop and culture blog   BUGGIN OUT! (+) . If you do anything, check out her audio. Infectious and dropping mad wisdoms!

This is Intisar ABioto. Today is March 24th, 2009. We are in Dubose Park.. San Francisco, CA with Isa Nakazawa. Where were you born?

I was born in Charlotte, NC which is a fact that few people know and fewer people believe. Because I hardly strike you as the southern type. My parents lived there for about 10-15 years when my dad was working at an architectural firm out there.  I have really fond memories of Charlotte. It's really different right now. I haven't been back in so many years, but from what I understand it's turned pretty cosmopolitan ... a thriving counterculture, youth scene has developed. But my memories were kind of living more rural. We lived pretty far away from the neighbors. My memories mostly include climbing fruit trees, picking fruit with my parents, sharing a bunk bed with my sister Niki. She would always fall from the bunk bed to the floor, so I have this memory of just this thump in the middle of the night and it would be my sister falling off.


What brings you to San Francisco?

      Well, I have always since I was a little girl talked about California. It was one of my first words and my parents really never talked about  it, so I really don't know why I've always been drawn to the west coast. When I was in middle school my dad used to make fun of me, because I would always say I'm going to be a marine biologist and go to Stanford. Now I don't know how I heard about Stanford or what my deal was with marine biology, but I was convinced that I was gonna save whales in California. So this has been like a trope throughout my life. I never really lived there or really visited there except trips to Los Angeles with my father and one trip with my sister when she was debating relocating to this coast after she graduated from RISD.
        So, then I decided to just be spontaneous before I graduated Wesleyan senior year. I moved out here and lived in Oakland with my two best friends Lisa and Ana. We just kind of did it as a trial, you know? Like, "why not?" was our question. Ana is from LA, but Lisa and I never had spent a significant amount of time out here. You just have a feeling about a place. You might not have your ten point reason, a job or something tangible. You just have an intuition. And we followed that and it was one of the best summers I've ever had.
    And by the time senior year was about to finish it was a struggle, because everyone flocked to New York. That's kind of the next step, right? That felt really seductive and right for me at the time, but then I realized it wouldn't be a challenge to me because it would kind of be a continuation of Wesleyan. And even though that's in my control.. like if I hang out with everyone I knew from Wesleyan.. or if I branched out... it would still just be a familiar flow. So then I moved out here on a post college whim. And I had already lived here for three months, so I knew it well enough. Just sun, change of pace, the adventure of it too, just not knowing what to expect and kind of seeking that.

So could you tell me a snippet of your submarine dream?

So last night I didn't sleep that well or that much, but I woke up in the middle of this dream I had  where I was part of a crew that was manning a submarine in San Francisco near Embarcadero... which doesn't make any sense. And in the dream it was clearly not in San Francisco, but you know how dreams go.
   So yea, a lot of familiar characters from my everyday life were transported there nicely, except for Jason Lalor this kind of random dude who was the commander of the submarine. And in the dream it was my responsibility to make sure that we didn't get caught in seaweed. And basically in the dream the narrative climax is that we do of course get caught in the seaweed patch.
    So there's like mad chaos and the submarine was about to tip over or sink or I don't really know... the stakes were really high though. It's a happy ending ending though, because I managed to get some device to clean the seaweed out. And then we pop up for air. It was a really beautiful, crazy, and nice dream.

Who have you met in the bay area that you are really inspired by, who you believe is following their own path...?

    I've met so many people since I've been here that I think fall in that category. Although, I definitely thought I was going to meet more people. But then what you realize when you leave school is that your relationships change, the nature of making them, the nature of maintaining them. When you're meeting someone through a professional setting you know them in a professional way and there's a lot of compartmentalization that goes down with getting to know people. So it took a while. I've been here 9 months and I'm only now getting a sense of that in more of a three-dimensional way. I can tell you who's following their professional career path, but to me that's not really what you're asking. That's not really what I'm looking at.
     I work right now as a poet mentor and youth educator for Youth Speaks, which is a nonprofit spoken word and hip hop organization that serves thousands of youth. We believe the youth can speak for themselves. Basically everyone in that organization that I've met is someone that has inspired me tremendously and possesses such a rare spark and a flame. They're all the types of people who at every step of the process are questioning themselves. They have that critical sensibility that I was really thirsting for when I graduated, because I wanted to know that it could exist in this world. It just makes them so sharp with their work. It makes them complex and so simple. They have a clear focus. They love the youth. They love poetry. They believe poetry is a means to uplift the youth, but the youth are uplifting themselves. It's not like some patronizing paternalistic politics. I think they really believe that they are students and teachers of life, so they don't have that complex you often find in Teach for America and those types of organizations. They're all constantly learning and open to learning from life, from their students, from their failures, from their mistakes.
    As writers and people they are constantly challenging themselves to be the best that they can be in this moment... and if that means improving the quality of their work which means being acceptable and transparent to the youth... that to me is so hard to find. Everyday that I work there I just have to take a moment to be like... I'm so blessed to be here.. and that sounds very cliche, but I just feel that everyone I've brought to the Youth Speaks event.. they're just like whoa, there's something really happening here. Just the diversity and range of events. It's the people, the people who run it, the people who attend it. It's everybody. It's not just the executive staff. It's the students. It's the youth, the people that we collaborate with and other organizations. It just attracts like a magnet for really bright energy right now.  We live in a time of crisis and catastrophe where these magnets are providing a lot of hope for people - necessary hope and necessary faith just to exist, to exist and breath and laugh. I think I was telling you about this earlier, but I've kind of stayed away from very activist circles and organizations, because the people that I was meeting from there really came off very dogmatic interpersonally, so I started moving towards more artistic venues.. where like yeah, no one's perfect. You find people are unreliable, flaky. But I'd much rather pick that battle over someone who is secretly a fascist. They don't really have their heart in what they're doing and they almost reify exactly what they seem to be fighting against. So the people that I've met out here are just like young poets and leaders of this life who are creating the present and the future moment and setting it up for folks. And I'm really into sustainability right now, especially since we're watching and bearing witness to our earth's decay. So if you're standing idly by that's how your history will be written... But all the people who have sparks are inciting that inspiration in young people. So I'm not giving specific names.. just that community is real here. And I don't use the word community lightly. It's actually people who have each others' backs, who check in with each other, who love each other, who fight with each other. It's real. It's not quote unquote community. We're bound by certain principles. Nah, its family.

Could you tell me just a little bit about your workshop?

I'm going to be starting a workshop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called The Way I See It: The Art of Storytelling. Basically my sisters are both visual artists. All three of us are interdisciplinary in the way we look at life and the way we create art. I've always been interested in the connections between visual media culture, art, and the word -  the spoken word and the written word. I wanted to create a workshop in which poetry is inspiring and prompting the visuals  and the visuals are informing and prompting the written and performed word. Because it makes sense to me. Not because its like an exercise, but because it just is.  

     Perception happens. It never is not happening. You're perceiving the world through language...through a visual landscape. I feel like unfortunately in education, the visual is what goes. Yea, the literacy rates are crazy, but that's literacy in a very limited, narrow definition. Words. Vocabulary. You can call these students illiterate, but then you haven't tested their visual vocabularies or their moving vocabularies. All these youth are meant to think they are undesirables, castaways, or whatever word you want to use, when their talents and their resources aren't being exercised or showcased and aren't being nurtured.  I just want to emphasize literacy in the traditional definition and also the other ways in which we express ourselves and imagine our world.

  My big thing is storytelling, so I borrowed Slick Rick, The Art of Storytelling .. and Outkast, because to me those are the storytellers. Those are the people that I learned from as a young poet, coming into myself and my words. They really inspired me to break out of traditional canonical forms of speech and text and whatever the hell is going on inside you that you need to get out. You're going to need to get it out the way you need to get it out.
   At Youth Speaks we have this saying that "the standard is yourself." I think that is so true. We're not trying to come in and lead workshops so that you can leave spitting like Lil' Wayne or spitting like me or your best friend. That happens too much. People see something they like in someone and that's beautiful, but copying is not. And it's paralyzing because you're not speaking for yourself. You're speaking for someone else. For me, this workshop is about finding ways to tell your own story... using different pieces of art work or music and all these things to guide you and to inspire you. You don't exist in a vacuum. Your art has to hit something or be something. And if it's not reacting it's creating. You gotta know what's out there, see things, smell things, develop a palette.
       So, that's what I want to do really. Just get kids hype about art too.  A lot of these kids don't have any access to the museums... Like museums are scary intimidating spaces. You don't feel like you can touch anything or say anything. As someone who has been training there for some time, they are so open to it. It's not necessarily or inherently a place of surveillance. It's whatever we want to make it. So I want to make it a participatory space. I want to make it a space where young people .. Maybe they're not gonna kick it there all the time, but at least they can be 18 and be like .. Yeah, I've been to a museum. I liked it. I didn't like it... But at least if you didn't like it you know why... Because you've been. I grew up with museums, so I know how it helps you develop your own tastes. So that's why.

I know that you are involved in a lot of different things, that you are interdisciplinary in the way that you look at things. How does this perspective come into your personal projects like Buggin Out?

     I had an interdisciplinary major at Wesleyan. I feel like ever since I was little, I find my way to do that. I can't separate things easily. It's just the way that I see life. You could say it's the fact that I am a biracial person, but we all.. it's whatever.. I'm not trying to make that genetic argument right now. ..Everything in American society is compartmentalized, your profession. You're a nurse. You're an artist. Everything is capital letters. Everything is one thing and not the other thing. After meeting so many different types of people, I can honestly say that just doesn't work for anybody. It's just not true about anybody.  I understand how it societally .. organizing it and whatever whatever, but as far as seeing peoples' humanity, or seeing people's like .. Really, what are you about?... That's not a useful system of categorization to me. Something I've been noticing on twitter.. You know how on ..About Me.. it has to be 150 characters or less... it's like "DJ/Educator/Poet/MC/Taste-maker."
   It's like we're getting to the point where it's like what does it all mean? Everyone has so many hyphens to their shit now and that speaks to something. We are the age of renaissance men and women. Everybody's claiming "I'm a renaissance man."  Q-tips album was Renaissance. Mustapha Melo-X's mixtape was renaissance. It's not a coincidence that there is a resurgence and emphasis of some person or the admiration of somebody who can master multiple disciplines, multiple talents, multiple things. You speak 10 languages. You also play the tambourine. You got a good head on your shoulder. You gotta be everything these days and that's exhausting, but it's also because we are multidimensional people.
     So, I'm not just an artist. I'm not just a musician. With Buggin Out I was really wary to do another cultural blog, because .. how many of those are there? I think there is importance in making distinctions and really knowing a craft, but at the same time that's never been me. My sister is a visual artist. That's like what she's thirsty for in the morning. I'm not thirsty for a specific thing in the morning.  I've always been a net-worker, a social connector, someone that lives for a certain kind of synergy, a certain type of meeting of multiple worlds. I like collisions. It's not all this multi-culturalist narrative shit. I couldn't write a manifesto on being interdisciplinary, because it just is. That's how I see the world. I don't see it green in one eye blue in the other. It's messy. Life is messy.  I really think if people were to be honest with themselves, that's how we all see things. It's not black and white.

As a connector or a conduit what are you anticipating? What does it mean to you to be connected in the sense that new ways of being connected are being defined and crafted in this very moment? What do you see as possibility in this? Have you ever thought about that, your place in it?

As someone who... Like I said..  I think that is my craft. I think about it all the time. I think what makes me an effective conduit is that I've had to adapt... just because of the way I've lived my life. So for me new technologies, new locations, they're factors for sure, but I think as you're seeing with the development of new technologies and social networking devices or applications.. We're really finding out ways to make it work, with an increased globalized society. There's so much fragmentation right now. Things are so much faster and further apart and closer together, but I think people really do find their ways. You can critique blogs and twitter all day, but if it gives you a sense of connectedness that's real to you how can you really undermine that? If you do want to live where you want to live. You don't want to live in this wolf pack deal with your friends. You want to have your own independence, but you want to feel connected to them.
    Those things are real ways to feel connected, but I think the bottom line for me is that connectivity is everything. Without each other there's nothing. I'm just somebody who .. I'm gonna call you to check up on you. I'm gonna see what you're doing. I'm gonna find out. I'm gonna meet you where you need to be. I'm one of those people who makes it happen, because I've also seen a lot of people pass recently. The extra effort doesn't seem like that much effort when you really put it in perspective. Like you can talk all day about credit and recognition and who did it first. You can obsess over every detail, but just keeping up with your folks and developing those relationships and realizing they are never complete.
    That's something that I thought. I was like.. Well, I just want to move to San Francisco and meet all these new people and see if I can do it. I already know these people. I already know these homies that I went to school with. It's like ... No, you don't. You only knew them for four years. Yeah, over crazy circumstances, but you don't know them. Those relationships are just beginning. Yeah, you have that guilt of continuing your Wesleyan experience, but at the same time that experience needs to be continued.. if these people are your people. 
    I've moved out here and really embraced new people and new situations, but I've also realized I don't know everyone like that. That is the story that is being written still. So to me connectivity is what I do, because I'm pretty much nothing without the people in my life. I think you just need to see everybody as different stars and points in a larger constellation. You're not going to be equally close to everyone, but if you know what you need from someone and what they need from you back it's really helpful. It's like having a directory. There are some people that I'm not homies with, its more professional, but I try to treat them with the same courtesy. That was kind of grimy to grapple with coming to real world and realizing  people just need to  assign you a certain value. Personally, I don't think that is using you as a resource. I think that is just using you.
    There needs to be more give and take and more communal activity for it to be defined as connecting. I think people throw these words around like community.. connection.. so lightly. There needs to be accountability. There needs to be systems and ways in which we check each other. Not in the activist way of that word-term, but I hold you down, you hold me down in x, y, and z ways. And we never get to x, y, z.  We just say.. I hold you down. Keep it real. bla bla... And it's like what are we even talking about? Our communities really suffer from that. Our projects really suffer from that. Because we are not connected. We like to pretend like "we're like this creative team".. And you're not. You're not.
    I think it's hard, so we'd rather just forget about it. But real connectors put in that work and get it back. So they are not just burnt out at the end of the day with a lot of great ideas and nobody around they can say is their homie or someone they've worked worked with. So I try to take that word seriously and really make it come true.

Coming back to your dreams, I know you said that you dreamed of being a marine biologist, which is interesting... that you had that dream about the submarine. Do you see or feel any lingering threads from the dreams of your childhood to what you are dreaming of and pursuing now?

    Yea, for sure. My sister kept a dream book. She's always been really aggressive about documenting her dreams. So she kind of eclipsed that for me actually. We were always talking about what she dreamed about. I didn't have a dream diary. She's the type of person who's like a sleeper and dreamer, daydreamer.
    I'm more of the activated ... I'm either extremely awake or really asleep. I'm someone who dreams while she's wide awake. I have a line in a poem that's like, "Just think of all the things we could speak into being if we stay awake long enough to dream with our eyes wide open."
    That line speaks to me because you don't have to be asleep to dream. If you emphasize empirical reality a lot you might not get my poetry.  Who knows what Intisar sees through her eyes, so I'd rather not press it. I think my love for allusion, for knowing about them and breaking them and playing with them has definitely lingered and followed me through my adulthood .. kept me young. I'm young, but kept me young mentally as positive thing, kept me questioning. And I think it's funny, because people think dreamers are naive and idealists, but I think they're really sharp. When you don't put everything into reality you suddenly go from very limited to kind of limitless. Potentials expand. I think its helped me...
    Because one of my pet peeves is people who are privileged, who have the flexibility to travel, [who] create so many countless excuses for them not to see the world, not to do what they really want to do.They just want to stay in their neighborhood. They just want to stay with their friends. They make up all these excuses, why you can do it and they can't. Why you're fluid and they're not. I think you're really missing out there because you're too invested in reality. You're too invested in the excuses and the rationality and I think you need to let go of that. Stop being such a square.

    But seriously, as a young person I was always really social and out there and just doing what I want to do.
And like I've told you before it's been so hard to meet men who aren't afraid to be different. Really? You're 27 and it's still the friggin playground where you can't be the different kid, because like.. Oh, no what will they think? .. I think my roommate said the other day, cause I'm always like "Adults..aRGGH.. Stodgy..crazy people" and he's like, "Adults are grownup kids. Whenever you're intimidated by an adult, imagine what they were like when they were like five." And it's so true. I remember coming out here and I was like.. I'll just date older guys... I feel like the guys my age aren't mature... And then you meet older guys and its the same problems, the same shit. Because we're just grown-up kids.. Everything follows you from childhood, your dreams, your ghosts, your fears.  Of course there's a continuity.. and breaking from it, or fighting it, or trying to hide the past or trying to bring it forward. All those things are at play all the time, but it makes life.. complicated. But it also simplifies it. Because you're like trying to project all this profundity onto people's issues and you're like.. Oh, this happened in your childhood... And it is that simple. They have that grudge from age eight. I think a lot lingers, maybe even too much.

 
The People Could Fly is always dealing with the concept of flight. What does flight mean to you?

I think flight definitely strikes me, because when I heard The People Could Fly Project.. I always have a very visceral reaction to it. I just love it. I love that name. You can just project whatever the hell you want onto it. I think that's the beautiful thing. If it gets too specific you don't feel like you can own it.
     Flight has an infinite permutation of definition and meaning.  It sucks the way popular culture pollutes all these.. Now I'm thinking of MIA and all these songs.. Fly is just such the word now. It's kinda great that it's a slang word that means what it means, given that it's a compliment. "You're fly. You fly high." Also because I work with youth so much that I think of it so much in slang context. It's said so much in that context that I rarely associate it with actual flight.
    It's funny because most of my dreams have to do with flight and water. Not necessarily swimming, like treading it, just being in it. Flight to me.. it is transcendence. It's also just a reminder of being human and the things we do regardless of X, Y, and Z. I think flight is my thing. I think it is the thing that moves me. I think people fly in a lot of ways that aren't literal in our lifetime, among us. It doesn't have to be such a literally expressed thing. As someone who's a poet and plays with words, flight to me is rarely literal. Toni Morrison.. all these books..  Walking fantasies and daydreams you have that save you. That's what the People Could Fly invokes in me, our waking fantasies. Flight as a form of escape or survival even, but beyond survival... like Audre Lorde.. "We were never meant to survive." We just wish we could soar, instead of pay bills.
Flight means a lot of things. I could go on forever. Those are just some initial thoughts.

I remember in your senior thesis there was this part where you were talking about fishes and swimming back and your lineage. That kind of traveling back or forward in time, playing in the future and the future playing in the past.. then even the thought of the palimpsest and things over each other and emerging through

That speaks to my interdisciplinary lens.. A palimpsest is an architectural documentation of where it's been and what's been inscribed on it and perhaps the prediction of what will be inscribed of it. It's just a memoir of the history of that surface. Ocean is a huge theme, cause that was a lineage story. My dad has a myth story about me and how I came to be which is kind of messed up, but super funny.. which is that I was a fish in Uruguay. Yeah, I'm Uruguayan. And St. Antonio was my saint, my birth father. And I was a fish in the ocean and I talked too much. Then he expelled me from the sea and gave me to my parents. So, that's an hysterical story. I had to really milk that and make that poetic and lyrical when it's really just funny and mean. My dad's like.. "I'm glad you're so verbose, because St. Antine would have wanted you still." The whole opening to my thesis is from the perspective of a fish in the ocean before I get expelled. I'm a fish in the water seeing my future and being like fuck that... but embracing it too. Yeah, I love fish. Uruguayans kind of have a little bit of an obsession with fish. Submarine and marine biology. Yeah, I guess I really love water.

IA: I just love that. It's really just spine-tingling to me . Just to think about stories and myths colliding and showing up when don't expect it.

Yea, My dad tries as often as he can to tell me that story. Like "Oh child, here is your myth.

What if someone or something could send someone or something to you to help you with anything you're doing, your personal works or desires. What might that be?

Oh yea.. I would have a list of immediate tangible needs. My favorite web designers could come through and like turn my site out. I would love that. At the same time  I love the process of learning myself and owning the makeshift haphazard nature of my site. Seeing how far you can get with a wordpress layout and some words. When I started that it was really about connectedness and keeping up with my folks. Then quickly I would write about someone and they would email me in five minutes flat..."..I just read with you wrote.." I'd be like this is crazy. You go from feeling like a nobody to somebody real fast, not necessarily famous, but just like how connected and how fast information travels.
   So, as many specific desires I have to collaborate with certain people I also maybe still am a romantic for the struggle.. for the ground up kinda work. Pharrell and Chad Hugo of the Neptunes are like two perfect examples. They're such amazing producers and such a good team, but every interview they have people are always like .. OK,  what are your words of wisdom for up and coming producers?...  And they're like if you're a rich kid and you can buy the fanciest equipment, you're not gonna be good. You're not gonna have the discipline and the focus.        I've always been really bad at answering these questions because I dream big and I have a really active imagination, but I also just try to do what's around and what's in my reach. Not because that's not a useful project, but just because it's an exercise in economy and what you can do with what you have.
       And I guess the recession has just really flipped my stuff. I just am thinking and meditating about what can you do with what you already have. I always loved that definition of community and confidence. It's like you already have what you need. You just need to figure out how you can get that. I could always say Malcolm X, Jonathan Yuen, all these people, my unborn son. These kind of things. But at the end of the day I have you, I have so much.. I guess I  feel fat off excess of connections.  At the end of the day it's about.. what are you not doing to get what you need? And I feel like I could be doing a lot more really. I have an alumni database. I have so many things. It's just a matter of getting over intimidation...getting over yourself, fear, getting over the potential that you could do something great.. and reaching out.  I feel like honestly it would be greedy of me to just sit here and list. I just lately I've been trying to think about how much I've got and make that work.
    If I locate and identify, specific things, like web design is a good example, because I don't have that many people in my life that are fluent in that.  So, if that's an area of my life I need to research, I'll do it.  But I'll do it at a time when I feel I need to step my game up.  I want a direction before I do something impulsive, because it is money. If you're not really serious about it, web stuff is not the way to go. It's money, it's maintenance, it's cost, involving developers. The minute you start involving more folks into your vision, you gotta have that vision... semi articulated. What I want right now is myself to focus and figure out and articulate to myself what I want, what I'm trying to do with these projects.. Fine tune it. Do a lot of work on myself and for myself. My personal struggle is that I'm the worst person at asking people for help. I'm the type of person that helps you whenever you need me. I can't ask for help. I'm working on it. I think we need to support each other in that way. You do a great job at just asking for help, or if you need anything, or how can I support you? Those questions are rarely asked. I think if we asked them more in a genuine way and gave more of ourselves to other people we'd be doing a lot more, at a faster rate. That's what I want. That's my vision... better communication. So, I guess it's really all about connectivity.